Gloria Steinem’s Life on the Feminist Frontier

A few minutes into dessert, the women began reminiscing about Ms. “before the Australians”—meaning the Australian media group that took over the magazine during a slump in 1987. Two years later, a group of American feminists was able to buy it back, and eventually Steinem helped form a foundation to keep the magazine in print, ad-free, as a monthly. It is a quarterly now, and its moment is in some ways past, but the message it sent was clearly heard, and today mass women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan vet political candidates for their stands on women’s issues, and groups like Emily’s List raise money to rank and support feminists among those candidates.

In the early nineties, Steinem decided that something important was missing in the peripatetic life that she describes as “the mixture of freedom and insecurity I needed.” By then, she owned two floors of the brownstone, but the only part that felt like home to her, and not a way station and movement hostel, was her desk and the garden off her study—and that was thanks to a green-thumbed reporter named Irene Kubota Neves, who had interviewed her, years earlier, for People, and, lacking a garden of her own to love, adopted Steinem’s.

The result was that Steinem went shopping. She started collecting furniture and fabrics. She bought frames for the photographs, pictures, poems, and letters that document the stages of her life on the road, including an almost comically deranged Christmas letter sent in 1971 to friends and family by a right-wing second cousin whom she had met four times, when she was in her teens. After wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, the cousin digressed, accusing Steinem, who at the time was raising money for the Angela Davis defense fund, of letting herself be “brainwashed” into endorsing such an “un-American” cause as the Black Panthers. “Gloria is the first of our name to depart from the American principles as to help our sworn enemies, so we must repudiate her pronouncements and disclaim the cousinship. Love and kisses.” Steinem told me, “I was thrilled to get it. Suppose he had liked me?”

The walls of her living room are painted a warm, deep Indian yellow. There are pillows everywhere, kilims on the floor, and an old wooden fireplace, with a couple of painted wooden figures, carved like mermaids—“I think from an Indian carrousel,” Steinem told me—lying on the mantelpiece, and, hanging between them, a long, thick, heavily decorated black tunic from Afghanistan, or maybe Kashmir. The room is cozy and crowded. When it gets too crowded, Steinem gives something away. “It’s how I redecorate,” she says.

Posters cover the walls of the front hall—a time line of the movement as it has changed during the course of her life. For years, Steinem made it a rule never to lecture or organize unless a woman of color was invited with her—a woman who could reach women whose problems of discrimination were far greater than her own—and also for courage, because she is prone to stagefright. (“Ironic,” she told me. “A media worker who loses her saliva before a talk and has to carry a mouth spray in her bag.”) There are posters of Steinem on the road with Dorothy Pitman-Hughes, the African-American activist who had opened a multiracial feminist day-care center in New York, and, later in the seventies, with the great black activist Flo Kennedy (who brought down the house one night when a redneck in the audience demanded to know if she and Steinem were lesbians, and she replied, “Are you my alternative?”). And there are posters from fund-raising galas of the past few decades, when feminism became a fashionable liberal cause, and women with money began sitting on movement boards.

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Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider. She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas. When she went to Los Angeles to speak at a big Equality Now benefit last fall, she told me how much she was looking forward to a meeting with the honchos at Creative Artists Agency the next day. They were going to discuss the status of women in the film industry—their comparatively low numbers, their discrepant salaries—and it didn’t matter if those women were movie stars or grips, or if her meeting required a large application of charm, dazzle, and good humor. She was ready for that.

For Steinem, the “conflagration of consciousness” that transformed second-wave feminism into a national movement occurred on November 18, 1977, when Bella Abzug—having persuaded Congress to authorize, and fund, a National Women’s Conference, in Houston—took the stage. It was an occasion that Steinem describes in her new book, beginning with the sentence “This conference may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about.” Steinem had already spent nearly a year organizing with Abzug, her congressional colleagues Patsy Mink and Shirley Chisholm, and a commission, appointed by President Carter, asking other American women what they, as women, wanted. She had travelled, state by state, to insure a more or less consistent process for the election of Houston delegates, and discovered, to her shock, the extent to which grass-roots groups of ultra-conservative women were prepared to co-opt that process—or, as she puts it, “Success can be as disastrous as failure—and it almost was.”

Two thousand official delegates came to the conference to discuss and vote on twenty-six different planks, from child care and lesbian rights, to foreign policy, and they were joined by eighteen thousand observers, making it, Steinem says, “probably the most geographically, racially, and economically representative body this nation has ever seen.”

Steinem describes her “surprise duty” at the conference as that of a scribe, since she had been asked by the various caucuses of women of color to collect and coördinate both their particular and their shared concerns and put them together in a plank that would replace the “so-called Minority Women’s Plank” submitted by various state conferences. What Steinem doesn’t describe is the extent of the women’s trust in her to do that. She had fought in solidarity with these women for years. “There is no competition of tears in feminism,” she once told me. “If you’ve suffered discrimination, you’re sensitive to it on every level. I learned feminism largely from black women. Women of color basically invented feminism.”

The women of color who came as delegates to Houston were scattered across the country. They had never met as a group before. “It was the first time I realized that being a writer was also being an activist,” Steinem told me. The African-American women raised “the umbrella issues of racism and poverty.” The Asian-Americans added language barriers, sweatshops, and isolation. The Chicana women added the ever-present fear of deportation—and of having to leave their children behind to be brought up by strangers. But Steinem says that nothing prepared her for the Native American women, who wanted to protect their languages and their culture, and to reclaim something of the tribal sovereignty guaranteed by the treaties that, as often as not, had betrayed them. They had one of the toughest jobs in Houston: to educate the only country we have, as one of the delegates put it, to the fact that we are also here.

The conference was a green light for millions of American women, including liberal Republican women—an endangered species now. (Betty Ford, who had campaigned for the E.R.A. and been a strong supporter of abortion rights, spoke there, along with Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter.) The N.W.C. delivered a political program that included equal employment, equal pay, and, crucially, full reproductive rights.

In the decades since then, feminists here and abroad have travelled, connected, and discovered that, in a new “world economy” of labor migration, immigration, and capital exploitation, women everywhere are at risk. The Global Fund for Women was founded by three Palo Alto feminists in 1987 and Equality Now in 1992, by Jessica Neuwirth, an American lawyer who had worked for Amnesty International; Navi Pillay, a South African lawyer; and Feryal Gharahi, an Iranian women’s-rights lawyer. A year later, the Iraqi-American activist Zainab Salbi put together Women for Women International. The issues for those groups now involve the kinds of violence against women that cross borders and increase as wars proliferate and the gaps in wealth widen.

In America, sex trafficking is said to be as high today as in any other country. Honor killings and forced marriages have been reported. Female genital mutilation, which affects ninety per cent of girls and women in countries like Somalia and Egypt, is now practiced within the diaspora here, despite a ban dating from the Clinton Presidency. According to Yasmeen Hassan, the global executive director of Equality Now, and the author of the first book on domestic violence to appear in Pakistan, more than five hundred thousand girls and women in the United States either are at risk of having F.G.M. or have already had it.

Steinem’s friends say that she can spot a strong feminist like Hassan from a helicopter, the way Sarah Palin claims she can spot a moose. It’s part of Steinem’s organizational agenda, and it can happen anywhere—on the street, or in a restaurant, or in line at a movie, when a stranger comes up to her and they begin to talk. It can even happen on the telephone. Pamela Shifman was a young white American working in South Africa, four years after apartheid ended, as a legal adviser to the parliamentary women’s caucus of the African National Congress, when someone in her office said, “This woman from your country, someone named Gloria Steinem, keeps calling. She wants to be helpful, so here’s her phone number.” Shifman called. “We’d never met, but Gloria was coming to South Africa for a conference, and she said, ‘I can stay on. Just tell me for how long, and let me do whatever you need me for,’ ” Shifman said. “She stayed a week. She worked with me on organizing strategies, and went to meetings with me, from morning to night. The only thing she asked of me was to take her to see the Rain Queen of the Balobedu”—whose job was to make rain, and to carry and pass on the oral history of her people. “Gloria had a ring, from her friend Wilma Mankiller, the Chief of the Cherokee Nation, to give to the queen, and she did.”

Steinem was determined that I speak with other women who, like Shifman, came of age during the eighties and nineties and are known in the movement as “third wave” feminists. Amy Richards was the first. “The smartest person I know,” Steinem said. Richards went to work for Steinem as a Barnard intern and now works alongside her on nearly every project, while at the same time, with a partner, writing books, running a young-feminist speakers bureau called Soapbox, and shepherding groups of college students through an intensive week of consultations and tough encounters at a Feminist Boot Camp.

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One night, Steinem crossed Central Park to visit Jessica Neuwirth, the later second-wave feminist who co-founded Equality Now but who, in the spirit of the third wave, had launched an online feminist nonprofit called Donor Direct Action, designed to connect donors with the grass-roots groups they support abroad. Neuwirth was grappling with a crisis involving one of her most at-risk recipient groups—a highly visible women’s-rights organization in Libya, whose director, Salwa Bugaighis, a fearless lawyer, had just been murdered by five assassins in her home, in Benghazi; Bugaighis’s husband had been abducted and her sister threatened that she was “next.”

Neuwirth had also invited Navi Pillay over and she wanted Steinem and Pillay—until last year, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—to help talk her through her choices and advise her on what to do to avoid exposing any successors to Bugaighis to the same risks. Steinem pointed out that every feminist active in Libya knew them, and, by being active, had chosen to take them on. Pillay listened, reserving judgment. Ten days later, Neuwirth introduced her donors to the Salwa Fund, using a video made by Bugaighis before her death. The video was now called “Rest in Peace, Salwa.” And the crisis remains unresolved.

Ai-jen Poo, the advocate for domestic workers and caregivers who won a MacArthur “genius award” last year, was another woman on Steinem’s list. Poo had started organizing as a student, and at twenty-two, with a grant from the Ms. Foundation, she began to organize domestic workers nationally—ninety per cent of them minority women—into associations. Today, at forty-one, she is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, with forty-seven affiliates across the country, representing fifteen thousand members. Poo once described Steinem to me as the feminist “who broke down all the silos of separation”—a second-wave feminist with a third-wave commitment to collective leadership and voice. “A lot of people talk about ‘network theory’ now,” she said. “It’s become an all-feminist strategy. But Gloria was always dedicated to lifting other women up, to sharing leadership with them. It was never about herself. And, because of that, for young feminists, it’s the new norm.”

This was evident when three of those younger feminists arrived at Steinem’s house one night for a few hours of vegetarian take-out, catching up, and sharing stories. Salamishah Tillet, a professor of English and African Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, came with her sister Scheherazade, an artist-in-residence at the Art Institute of Chicago. Scheherazade is the director of A Long Walk Home, the nonprofit they founded together, “to educate, inspire, and mobilize young people to end violence against girls and women.” Salamishah, six months pregnant with her second child (her husband was at home with the first), reluctantly took the roomiest armchair, at Steinem’s urging. Scheherazade tucked herself into the corner of a couch. Pamela Shifman, who is now the executive director of NoVo Foundation, one of America’s largest nonprofits for girls and women (it was founded by Warren Buffett’s son Peter and Peter’s wife, Jennifer), opted for the floor, having made the shortest commute, from Brooklyn. And the playwright and performer Sarah Jones, best known for her Tony Award-winning multi-character piece “Bridge & Tunnel,” joined us, by way of a Skype video stream, from the West Village, where she was in jet-lag meltdown after three weeks in Europe, interviewing prostitutes for a new show she was developing called “Sell/Buy/Date.”

Jones had spent some of her trip sitting in a red-lit storefront window in Amsterdam, soliciting. “I wanted to have this experience,” she told her friends at Steinem’s. But it was the prostitutes themselves—“the politics” of their indoctrination—who unsettled her. “It was very fraught for me to hear them rage against the anti-trafficking movement in America,” Jones said. “They talked about ‘sex workers’ rights’ in Western Europe. They said, ‘We are voluntary migrant labor here. We have health care, education, a safety net. We like our jobs.’ I asked those women, ‘If you had a daughter, would you want this for her?’ ”

The women responded to Jones with some preoccupations of their own. Salamishah, who had been raped herself, talked about rape victims, who become “super invisible,” even and especially to themselves, and asked the group, “How do you intervene without using the language of pathology?” Scheherazade asked, “How do we create” a new language? Steinem quoted the runaway slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman—who, on forays into the South, freed hundreds of other slaves—saying, “I could have saved thousands if only they knew they were slaves.” And Shifman talked about the women who used to be housed at the Bayview Correctional Facility, in Manhattan, across from Chelsea Piers. Bayview, a notoriously cruel women’s prison, was closed three years ago, and its prisoners were transferred. Shifman said that at one point the prison—its women scarred from puberty by the inextricable triad of poverty, prostitution, and drugs—had the highest percentage of staff sexual misconduct of any prison in the United States.

The conversation was wide-ranging, but by the end of the evening no one, including Jones, knew what, exactly, to make of that week in Amsterdam.

It’s safe to say that for feminists in their twenties—think “fourth wave” feminists—social media has put an expiration date on many of the old certainties. The Internet effect has arguably been paradoxical, something that is at once concentrating and diluting the political energy and solidarity of the women’s movement, leaving young women free to confront new issues in necessarily new ways.

Those issues—sex-work issues, race issues, sexual-assault issues, police-brutality issues, even transgender issues and language-identity issues—have in fact always been movement issues and, in particular, Steinem’s issues. She worked hard to get lesbian rights included in the platform of the N.W.C. in 1977. (Even Friedan, who called lesbians “the lavender menace,” voted for it.) And her record on racism and police brutality has been unimpeachable. (“Violence in any patriarchy begins at home, in the family,” she told me.)

She likes to point out that today’s generational byword, “intersectionality,” was in fact coined in the late eighties, by the African-American law professor and race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, who used it to describe interconnected forms of discrimination, whose consequences each woman has to balance and negotiate, and feminists have to acknowledge and understand.

Steinem readily acknowledges that the Internet has been revolutionary in giving feminists—particularly black and gay feminists, who in the past were largely unheard by the mainstream media—a voice, and that some important young feminists are now emerging through platforms like Twitter. But she is wary about calling the Internet effect unequivocally “democratizing,” as many of those feminists claim.

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“It’s great that we can now sidestep the editorial judgments of the mainstream media,” she told me. “But it’s important to remember that conflict makes news, conflict gets attention, and the Internet thrives on conflict. You have to ask where a lot of these posts about our so-called divisions on issues like race and gender come from. What’s the context? Who’s arguing? And, remember, you have to be able to afford an iPhone or a computer; you have to be literate, which a lot of women in the world are not; and you still have to make change happen in real life, because empathy—the ability not just to know but to feel—only happens when we are together with all five senses. This is part of the reason people can be so hostile to each other on the Web, and women, especially, are subject to so much Web harassment.”